by AM Kirkby
***
Tanaquil wanted to wander on her own, but everyone had plans for her. She was shown the sights like a tourist, as if she hadn't spent years in Velzna, as if she didn't know every inch of the city better than the sleek and glib youngsters they sent to accompany her. Everything had to be shown; it wasn't enough to see it, it had to be explained and itemised and made into stories, as superficial as her guides. Her time had to be accounted for, like a prisoner's. They took her to see the vegetable gardens, as if she'd never seen one before; the goat pens, the temple of the consenting gods, the classrooms, the grove. Frivolities and sublimity, the quotidian and the numinous mixed together in deadening juxtaposition.
They took her to a class being taught in one of the porticoes. The students had been chanting one of the prophecies, the words accentuated in a strange halting rhythm, but they stopped short as soon as she entered, except for one boy who carried on for a few beats before realising he was alone. There was always one of those, she thought.
She felt immediately the falsity of her position; here's a distinguished visitor, boys and girls... They had risen from their cushions on the floor, now, at their teacher's bidding, but they were still so much lower than her eye level that she felt clumsy and grotesque. They stared at her as if she had let them down in some undefinable but unforgivable way. She wondered how many distinguished visitors they had to put up with. She wondered, too, how many of those visitors were truly distinguished.
"Ask them a question," her guide said.
What kind of question did you ask? Never at a loss in a diplomatic meeting or at a banquet, Tanaquil couldn't think what was appropriate in this situation, and the guide hadn't given her any help. She thought back to what she'd learned; one of the unanswerable questions old Spurinna had liked to spring on them ("to make you think", he'd always said).
"What did Tarchies say when he sprang from the furrow?"
No one answered. They stared at her again. One child was chewing a stalk of grass she'd put in one corner of her mouth. Tanaquil could see a couple of others shuffling their feet.
"That was too difficult," the teacher said. Something censorious in her attitude rankled. The question had been meant to be difficult, after all. Something easier, then; a question from the basics of the augur's discipline.
"Which is the region of the infernal gods?"
"That's too easy."
"Well, then."
Still none of the children answered. One of the girls looked sideways, wriggled her shoulders. She had bright eyes, Tanaquil saw, and an air of impatience.
"You," Tanaquil said. The girl's mouth twitched.
"Arunthia," the teacher said. There is a certain tone of voice which threatens condign punishment at the same time as indicating a great weariness with the certainty that such punishment will be needed; it was this tone of voice which Tanaquil recognised, instinctively, with the mere saying of the girl's name.
"The-region-of-the-west-is-given-to-the-infernal-gods." The girl said it all in one breath, in a fast, clipped monotone, as if she were repeating a much-rehearsed lesson: which she probably was.
"Good," the teacher said, as if it was anything but.
"Do you enjoy studying?" Tanaquil asked the girl.
"Miss?"
"Your studies. Do you enjoy them?"
The question didn't seem to make sense to the girl. She screwed her face up, looked at the teacher, at Tanaquil, back at the teacher.
"I suppose," she said.
"Good," said Tanaquil, and saw relief on the girl's face. "Where is she from?"
"The north. One of the new cities," the teacher said. "I think she's half Celt. Quite a few of them are, these days. Too many, I'm afraid."
She made the students recite for Tanaquil; not the prophecy they'd been chanting when she came in, but part of the Medicinal. "The following plants are poisonous," she started, and the students joined her in the list: "the nightshade, the foxglove, the hemlock. Hensbane and wolfsbane, and the oleander. Of the nightshade, the berry, the leaf and the root. Of the foxglove, the root, the seed and the leaf."
She'd learned like that; repeating, so that now, if she thought of nightshade, the words "foxglove, hemlock, hensbane" came straight after, without her making any effort to recall them. Being able to call that knowledge up so easily, so many years after, had its uses; but she found it dispiriting that these students had so little to say for themselves.
"Do they learn the medicinal uses of foxglove?" she asked.
"Not yet."
She looked around. None of the students met her gaze.
"It's not appropriate, at this age," the teacher said.
"Which is what?"
"Fourteen."
Old enough to bear children, not old enough to heal. Tanaquil had surely known more, and more deeply, by fourteen; not just dull facts. Old Spurinna had taken them out to the plain, looking for plants, healing and hurtful; this lot wouldn't recognise nightshade berries if they saw them, or the signs of a poisoning, come to that. Like everything else in Velzna, the schools weren't what they had been.